


Christmas Tears

by we_all_fall



Series: Falling Stars [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Christmas Lights, Crying Sam Winchester, Depressed Sam Winchester, Emotionally Hurt Sam Winchester, Gen, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt Sam Winchester, John Winchester Being an Asshole, Kid Fic, Kid Sam Winchester, Mute Sam Winchester, Near suicide attempt, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-05 05:20:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16804408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/we_all_fall/pseuds/we_all_fall
Summary: Five-year-old Sam Winchester celebrates his first Christmas after Dean's death by almost killing himself and looking at the stars.





	Christmas Tears

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't a kind fic. Warning: the main character spends most of the fic seriously contemplating suicide. Don't read this if reading about cutting or suicide attempts is a problem for you.  
> Also, this is the second fic in a series. It can be read as a standalone but it's meant to be a few months after One Small Change, so read that first if you want. It's only 2,000 words or so, like this one.

It was the time of the year when people insist on pretending most carefully to be happy if they aren’t. And if they are happy, the chaos and cheer of the season seizes them and lets them float on clouds before dropping them into exhaustion at the ending. It isn’t a gentle holiday. Its conflicting nature of pagan rites, covered in a Christian celebration, covered in consumerism makes it hard to celebrate or understand, but it’s the most powerfully celebrated holiday anyway. Normally Sam loved it.

This year he hated it. Everything about it was wrong.

Last year, he’d painstakingly written Dean a note and attached it to a pretty shell he’d found on the beach a few months before. Writing had been hard work and he’d had to get Dean’s help with the spelling of a lot of the words, which kind of spoiled the surprise, but Christmas wasn’t a big tradition in their family and he figured it was the thought that counted. John hadn’t been there, which was disappointing, but Dean had been there so it was good. Dean was always there back then, and Sam hadn’t been able to imagine a world without his big brother.

The year before last was hard to remember, but he thought there’d been some kind of special meal and they’d sung Christmas carols and played a card game that went over his head. Dean and John had both been there, and they’d been happy. Mostly. Winchester style happy, he guessed.

Sam knew there were benefits to the holiday season, but they were hard to see. An obvious one was that school was out. Sam loved learning, but not so much repeatedly lying to the teachers about his home life, his dad’s job, where he was staying, and why he had to leave after just a few days or a few weeks there. It was all depressing and hard to keep track of. And then of course there was the added problem that Sam couldn’t get his throat to work right anymore, so he had to write out all his lies. He’d tried talking, but he just couldn’t make it work. He couldn’t get any sound to come out.

He was working on his speed writing over the break so that life would be marginally easier in the spring. He’d still get wound up in lies and struggle to repair the holes in his story, and he’d still get picked on for not talking, but maybe he could lower the chance that someone would figure out a little of what was actually happening and send child services after him. That would be scary. He’d already lost Dean, he couldn’t handle losing John as well, even if he’d never really had him. Sam didn’t fully have anything.

If only Dean hadn’t died… but he had, and there was no changing it. Sam had to move on if he was going to be able to live. He wasn’t sure if there was any reason to live, though. What was he living for? It wasn’t something he’d ever thought of before Dean’s death, but since then his whole world had changed. He’d played with the thought on and off, wondering if it would be so bad to join his brother.

John might care, but it didn’t feel like it. And maybe he didn’t. Anyway, if Sam did it, it would be a purely selfish decision. He was under no delusions that this decision would bring anything good to anyone else. The question was just whether or not he wanted to live. It wasn’t a question he knew the answer to. How was he supposed to answer something like that? Why did he even have to think about this kind of thing? His head hurt.

Sam started crying. Everything was too overwhelming and he just wanted it to stop.

 _You could make it stop,_ a little voice in the back of his head whispered, _You have a silver knife and a gun. The gun is just lying on the bedside table there. One clean shot to the head-_

Sam screamed, cutting off the voice in his head for a moment. He quickly clamped his hands over his mouth to silence himself, not wanting to attract attention. He had to lie low. A five-year-old kid alone in a motel room with no way to contact his parents was too suspicious, and he was too upset to think up a decent story. He couldn’t afford to make any noises.

He dropped slowly to his knees, dragging his hands down his face and screaming silently. For a moment he’d been able to scream, but that moment was passed and it didn’t matter anymore if he tried to make noise. The screams stopped after a minute or so, but the crying kept on until he ran out of tears. He looked around thoughtfully. He didn’t want to stay in the motel room, but he didn’t have anywhere to go.

It didn’t take long for Sam to decide to just go for a walk. He didn’t have to have anywhere to go to walk, so it would just be aimless meandering. His lips twisted in a wry smile as that sounded vaguely poetic. Aimless, pointless life: aimless, pointless walk. But thinking was going to make him cry again if he kept it up and he didn’t have the energy for that. He just wanted to get out of his head.

 _You’d be out of your head forever if you just had the guts to end it,_ the voice came again.

Sam snatched his key card off the bedside table and slid his knife up his sleeve, hurrying out of the motel room. He foolishly assumed that the voice would go away if he got out of the room. Surely it couldn’t follow him everywhere, right? That would be too horrible for even his life.

_Stab wounds work, too. There’s obviously a reason you brought your knife with you. You’d get to see Dean. Don’t you love your brother?_

Sam felt a wave of anger. It was so unfair! Apparently, fate was having a great laugh at his expense. He _hated_ it. Why him? Was there something wrong with him, that everything around him always went wrong? His mother had died in a fire that started in his nursery. His father had gotten pulled into hunting to the point where he practically went insane. His brother had died trying to save _Sam_ , because Sam had stupidly left himself open to getting kidnapped by a bunch of vampires. He’d always felt a little off, as though there was something wrong with him bubbling just beneath the surface. Dean had held it back. Now he was gone, and whatever was wrong with Sam was coming out. And the voice in his head… was that normal? He didn’t know. Probably not, as when had anything in his life ever worked normally?! Why him?!

_You’re a freak. You should kill yourself to spare the people who have to be around you. Two horizontal slashes across two wrists, and all the blood in your body will seep out. You’ll be dead. It probably won’t even hurt that much, but if it does, you’ll deserve it._

Sam started running. He wasn’t running blindly or anything stupid like that, John had trained him far too thoroughly. He carefully avoided streets that might lead to dangerous sections of the town. Well, more dangerous than the section where the motel was, anyway. He kept track of where he was going so that the way back would be easy.

When his legs burned enough to slow him to a walk he was in a nice neighborhood. Most of the houses had lots of pretty Christmas lights up. He’d forgotten the lights. They weren’t something that had seemed to matter before, but now they seemed incredible in an odd way. Especially the white and pale blue ones. Something in their soft beauty reminded him of home, which didn’t make sense to him. Home was Dean, or the Impala. Ideally both at once. The ghostly twinkle of Christmas lights shouldn’t mean anything to him in particular.

The silvery lights draped over a bush reminded Sam of starlight, and he looked up to see if the stars were out yet. The sky wasn’t really dark enough this early, but the first few stars were peaking over the horizon and gently glowing against the rising canopy of the night. They felt too far away, as though they were meant to be closer. Maybe it was the wrong time of year. Sam sighed. He felt like he’d lost something he’d never known.

 _If it wasn’t for you Dean would still be alive,_ the whisper in his head spoke up.

Sam froze. That was- that wasn’t true, right? Was it? It was hard to breathe. Dean had been on the case with John, but- if Sam hadn’t gotten kidnapped, then Dean wouldn’t have let the vampires catch him off guard, and he wouldn’t be dead. Sam had killed Dean.

_You still have the knife._

Sam dropped to his knees on the hard sidewalk in front of the house with the Christmas lights like stars. His hands shook as he pulled out his knife. There was no debate in his mind anymore. If Dean’s death was his fault then he didn’t deserve to live, and it would be best if he killed himself. The knife handle was cold, so cold. An icy feeling seeped up from the frozen sidewalk and clawed its way up into him. Everything was so cold.

Sam’s shoulders were shaking as though he were crying, but his eyes were burning and dry. His mind was perfectly clear. His thoughts were like frozen teardrops, clashing against each other in a cacophony of breaking glass shards.

How was he going to do this? He could think of three ways, but he didn’t know which was best. He could stab himself in the heart as hard as he could, and try to pull the knife out and repeat the motion if it didn’t immediately kill him. Or he could see if he could get the angle right to slit his own throat. The last option was to cut deeply across the insides of his wrists.

Sam set the knife down on the cold sidewalk and unzipped his coat. The sleeves were a little long for him and he knew he wouldn’t get good access to his wrists with the coat still on. He dragged the coat off and dropped it to the side. There was no wind, but the simple coldness of the atmosphere set into him. He shook uncontrollably. He wasn’t sure by then whether he was shaking more from emotional upheaval or cold. There didn’t seem to be a difference.

For a moment he didn’t feel sure of what he was planning to do. He looked upwards as if for guidance and noticed that in the time he’d been thinking the last of the light had gone. The stars were up, glittering distantly in the sky. They were beautiful, a careless, cold beauty. The stars were forever, and they couldn’t care about one messed up human boy. In the scope of the universe Sam Winchester didn’t make the slightest difference, and no one could possibly notice if he died. It would be better that way. He wouldn’t be able to mess anyone else’s possibly slightly more significant life.

He set about rolling up the sleeves of his shirt to expose his wrists. The blue veins of blood across the insides of his wrists stood out against his cold-whitened skin. He picked up his knife and held it over his wrist. His hand was shaking and the knife handle was freezing, but it felt natural and _right_ in a way that scared him.

He was terrified, but he told himself it would all be over in a moment. He wouldn’t be alive anymore. Where would he be? He wanted it to just stop, but he was pretty sure heaven or hell was waiting for him. Hell was eternal torture, and he was pretty sure Dean wouldn’t even be there. Dean was innocent, just a child. He wasn’t a nasty mess like Sam who’d tried to take his own life.

Oh, God. That was what Sam was doing. He was committing suicide. He was going to _kill himself_. A rush of horror swept past the cold that had bound it and let him feel what he’d been about to do. A shrill cry of fear left him, and he jumped to his feet, dropping the knife with a clatter. It took a few moments for his legs to start working, but then he was running as fast as his legs could carry him away from the place where he’d almost- almost- he couldn’t even stand to think about it. And suddenly he was crying.

He slowed to a walk after a while and realized he wasn’t sure just where he was. He meandered for a while until he found a street he recognized. And then he realized how cold he was, and that he’d left his coat behind. His sleeves were still rolled up and the icy cold was setting in. He quickly rolled his sleeves back down with jerky movements, feeling sick with the reminder of what he’d tried to do. He wanted his coat, but there was no way he was going back for it. He couldn’t go back. Not- _there_.

He wrapped his arms around himself and hurried back towards the motel room. By the time he got there his fingers were so stiff with cold that it was a struggle to get the key card out of his pocket. And once he’d done that it took four tries for it to take and actually get the door open. By that time, he was in tears again. Could nothing go right in his stupid life? What was wrong with him? What had he ever done?

He shut the door and collapsed on the bed, sobbing. He cried himself to sleep that night. When he woke in the cold, early morning light nothing felt quite the same. The normally scruffy parking lot was covered in a thin layer of fresh snow, and there was something pure in its emptiness. A deciduous tree on the edge of the lot was covered in snow and cast an intricate shadow across the white ground. It was beautiful, and something painful in Sam’s heart lifted a little. He wasn’t happy or anything, but it was manageable and he was pretty sure he could live like this. He would survive.

Sam spent about an hour going through his usual routine with a lightness in his step that normally was missing, but then a hard realization left him near tears again. He wasn’t going to just get away with having lost his knife like that when John came back. He certainly couldn’t explain what had happened, so he would have to go back to where _that_ had almost happened and bring back the knife he’d intended to slit his wrists with. He knew he’d never look at the knife the same way again.

He was shaking. He couldn’t go back there! He couldn’t. He struggled to hold back his tears.

In the end, he knew he had no choice. He was going to have to walk back to that road where he’d nearly taken his own life and bring back the knife he’d nearly taken it with. John’s wrath was not something that he could face if he had any other option, and it was possible for him to go back and get the knife. And so he would.

It took Sam fifteen minutes of frustrated searching and researching the motel room before he remembered he’d taken off his coat and forgotten it when he was preparing to die. It was on the sidewalk next to his knife. He only owned the one coat, so he wasn’t entirely sure what to wear to keep warm on the walk out. He had a lot of long sleeve shirts, so he put on four layers of flannel shirts and hoped it was warmer out.

It wasn’t. He walked hurriedly to try to keep warm, grateful for the pressure keeping him from dragging. If he wasn’t freezing he knew he’d have slowed to almost nothing to delay reaching that place on the street for as long possible, and it was better to get the experience over with. He just wanted it to be over so he could move on and work on living and related problems. He didn’t want to have to think about the fact that he’d nearly committed suicide on that block of houses under the stars and in the darkness.

The walk didn’t take anywhere near long enough for Sam’s taste. The snow was covering the coat and the knife so they weren’t immediately visible. That was lucky, in a way. He would have been in trouble if someone had spotted them and taken them somewhere. He wasn’t trying to pay attention to the Christmas lights this time, but he noticed them anyway, like the last time he’d been on that block. Well, what he really noticed was that the bush with the lights that had reminded him so heavily of the stars must have been unplugged or something, because the lights were out. It left an empty place in the yard where something needed to go for it to look even and balanced. Strangely, it made the entire picture even more beautiful, and even more strangely that made Sam start crying.


End file.
